It\'s only right that we suffer for our shoes

A woman named Sophie King has been awarded £7,200 compensation for injuries she sustained when her stiletto heel broke, pitching her on to the ground and breaking her ankle. I've sprained my ankle more than once while wearing silly shoes (yes, I know I'm putting silly before the wrong noun), but my shoes didn't have the decency to break on me.

Ms King's genius, it turns out, was in buying inexpensive heels – they originally cost £35. Now she can afford a pair that certainly should hold up better: Manolo Blahnik retailed a pair of alligator-skin boots a few years ago for $14,000, or £7,000, which is the exact amount of Ms King's compensation.

Every woman knows that high-heeled shoes are going to hurt, whether it be your feet, your bank account, or both. And before anyone sneers at supposedly intelligent women voluntarily inflicting pain upon themselves, pause and consider whether you've ever been hung over. The initial pleasure always seems worth the inevitable suffering.

Most of the women I know have Cinderella syndrome to some extent, the faith that the right pair of shoes are worth the agony. After all, it is hard to imagine a more painful material for shoes than glass.

The impracticality of glass as footwear is so striking that it tempted some scholars to argue that Charles Perrault's 1697 Cendrillon ou La Petite Pantoufle de Verre was a mistranslation of "vair", or fur (they have been widely discredited, should the producers of QI be reading).

But folk tales featuring the so-called "slipper test", in which a hero identifies his bride by means of her shoe, stretch back to antiquity: there is a version from ninth-century China, which probably explains the story's emphasis upon small feet as a gold-standard of beauty.

An even earlier Sanskrit version, dating from the fifth century AD, has recently been identified, and there are heroines recognised by virtue of their beautiful shoes in ancient Greek and Roman tales, as well as in stories from Iran, Afghanistan, and Africa.